Aastha - Week 7

Aastha Bhardwaj
Reflection Paper 6
24th April , 2020

On Ambedkar Jayanti 

We’re faced with blatant ironies in our weekly lives perhaps more often than we’d like to, and the biggest one that arose out of this situation has been the arrest of Anand Teltumbde along with Gautam Navlakha on Ambedkar Jayanti which falls on 14th of April. The arrest which was garbed as one against an anti-national would be better looked at through the lens of the inherent caste bias in our society whose abolition the very day is considered to be a celebration of. The caste and class divide is so clearly reflected in how the reactions of the upper caste came about as to those of the lower castes. While the former celebrated the arrest considering it a step forward in building nationalistic sentiments, the latter deemed it as an action that took us way back, in perhaps the little progress that was made over the years, and rightfully so. How deep rooted the caste struggle is comes out in Awanish Kumar’s piece ‘Reading Ambedkar in The Times of COVID-19’ wherein he re-visits the contention put forth by Ambedkar, that the caste system in India itself is what isolates the dream of a collectivized Indian public, because the two separation of castes are always at war with each other . This has not failed to come out in the times of a global health crises either. In this month alone it has become abundantly clear that neither is India public together in fighting the crisis at hand, nor is it united in the fight against a fascist regime.

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